FF: April Fools

It probably comes as no surprise, but April Fools has never been my thing. I don’t plot how I’m going to trick people and am pretty unfazed (and hyper aware) if anyone tries pulling one over on me.

I know some of the family classics are telling your kids there’s no school (may have worked today), switching out the salt and pepper shaker, saying you won the lottery, and so on. On Facebook today the school/snow one seemed to be the biggie.

For today’s FF we’ll talk about the best (and worst) April Fools jokes. Have you ever been duped? If so, how. Or … were you able to pull one over on someone else?

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40 some odd years ago, my father thought he was being fooled, when he got the call from Albany med that he had a son. He wasn’t. Sooo, every year, people think it’s hilarious to try to fool me. It’s not ;)

My favorite pranks took place when I worked at a retail computer store in Latham as a software trainer. Since I taught classes that began before the store opened I got there before most everyone else (yes they actually let me have keys to the place) so I got the store manager and the sales staff pretty good. For the manager, who left his computer on at night and had no password protection on it, I made his background wallpaper the “This program has performed an illegal operation…” message (it was still Windows 98). No matter how hard he tried to close the window it would not shut down because he was actually clicking the background wallpaper. For the sales staff I simply removed the tracking balls from all the mice on the cash wrap systems.

Ok now I love FLY92 and JAMZ 96.3 but come on. I don’t understand how people fall for the outrageous stuff they come out with on April Fool’s Day. It’s April 1st and suddenly, we have a feline restaurant and Chrissy’s pregnant. Really?

I actually just pulled one over on my sister-in-law and it was AWESOME! I did it on Wednesday so she wouldn’t suspect anything…

We had planned a couple of weeks ago to buy Mikey Buble tickets when they went on sale, so she bought them this Wednesday morning. When she emailed me that she had bought the tickets, I told her that I had forgotten all about it and that the price she paid for them was WAY too high and I wouldn’t be able to go. She became livid, called both her sisters and complained about me and was angry that she now had an extra ticket. IT WAS CLASSIC!!!!!

Last year my boyfriend and I changed our FB relationship to “Engaged”. I also took a picture of my left hand with my grandmother’s diamond ring that I’ve been wearing on my right hand for about four years (shows how observant people are) and we didn’t say anything else. Between text messages, facebook posts and comments over a hundred people congratulated us and only ONE said “I hope this isn’t an April Fools joke.”

I thought the ring would be a dead giveaway because he works in EMS, and there’s no way he could’ve afforded a ring like this without financing it, which I would never in a million years allow him to do. Not to mention I would never, ever post a picture of the ring anyways.

We seriously considered doing it again today, just to see who was still desperate to see us be “normal” and make it legal already!

I’m going to hell, I already know, but 3 years ago I got my grandmother 10 lottery scratch-off tickets…seven were real and three were fake. The three fake ones were all winners, but not just any winners, $50,000, $2,000 and $250,000 winners. hahaha

She nearly passed out…my brother and I let her mentally spend that money in her head, brag to the neighbors and show off until nearly dinner time…and then we broke the news.

This is not technically an April Fool’s prank but I knew if I waited too long I’d miss my chance so… a few weeks ago my coworker was telling me all about how he joined an online dating site, went out with a girl and although she was clearly into him, he wasn’t feeling her at all. He decided he’d see how far he could take things and then when he scored a home run he’d stop returning her calls. He proceeded to tell me in painstaking detail how she made him dinner and then he convinced her to take things to the next level all the while making it clear that he was just using her. This was not okay with me so I waited for him to leave his phone at his desk, swapped out the poor girl’s phone number with mine (and changed mine to my boyfriend’s) and proceeded to text him incessantly for the next 3 days asking him to hang out again, telling him that she met his friends out somewhere and found out that he had given her a FAKE name, asking if she did something wrong when he didn’t respond and making it clear that she believed they were dating. The final straw was when she told him that her parents wanted to meet him. He lost it. The whole time he was confiding in me and another coworker that he didn’t know what to do and she was crazier than he thought. It was kinda awesome and more importantly, he learned his lesson.

Several years ago I convinced my sister that my ex-boyfriend and I(an ex -boyfriend that she detested) had decided to not only get back together, but had also decided to go on ahead and get married. I wish I had a recording of that conversation. I thought she was going to pass out.

Two of the best ones I’ve been privy to were both pulled off by radio stations:

The first was back in the 90’s and was a Connecticut radio station (KISS-FM, I believe): They announced that the Water Department had to flush the sewer lines and were highly recommending everyone put a brick on the toilet seat to keep it closed, just in case. I was only a teen at the time, but do recall that it had to have been a fairly successful ‘prank’ as it was talked about for weeks.

The second was in the early aught’s (somehwere between 2000-2005 I believe), the local Top-40 station in Syracuse (93Q) had reported a sighting of Leonardo DiCaprio in the area, under the auspices he was in the area to meet with one of the Baldwin’s to discuss an upcoming project. They staged “reporter on the street” sightings and an impromptu interview, as they purportedly got someone into the limo with him. Leo fans and radio listeners were apparently running out to the streets to try and glimpse the limo as it passed on the route the station was reporting. I seem to recall even a few local media outlets were duped and ran the story before 93Q finally let everyone in on the joke. A classic.

2 years ago 1 of my best friends had just had a baby and the 2 other girls in our group were pregnant too. I kept telling them I couldn’t hang out with them b/c I was going to “catch” pregnancy from them. On April 1st I e-mailed all 3 and told them that I was right and did in fact catch pregnancy from them. Went the whole day getting advice and throwing around names…and then asked them all if they wanted to go grab a drink after work. When they said none of us could ’cause we were pregnant/nursing I finally told them the truth.

Years ago when Mason & Sheehan were on PYX106 they announced Led Zeppelin was going to tour with Jason Bonham playing drums for his late father. You were told to send in a self-addressed stamped postcard and they would pick winners from a barrel. I never got as far as sending anything in but I was definitely duped until a friend reminded me it was April Fool’s Day.

Kevin Marshall got me last year when he posted the Live at Five lineup, which included (I think) Bell Biv DeVoe. Whichever group it was, they did end up coming to the area, so I like to think I didn’t really get duped.

I think the no school one actually worked for some people today. There isn’t a lot of people here today at school- that or b) a ton of people are getting strep or c) 10th-12th graders are preparing for CBA’s prom tonight.

George Clooney once talked about one of the many tricks he played on his friends. It sounds so-so at first, but it’s truly sadistic. He gave one a painting – a horrible, embarrasingly bad painting – that he claimed to have painted especially for the friend. He was very sincere about it and subtly pressured the friend to hang it in the most prominent place in his home. Then he just sat back and waited. For years. And years. All the while seeing the painting hanging on his wall for everyone to see. For years. One day he finally coughed up the fact that the painting was just some thrown away piece of crap he picked up at a garage sale.

In 2006 I was helping plan an antique car show that was going to be held that June in Buffalo. It just happened to be April 1st when I needed to send out a update to the other members of the planning committee on how things were going.

Just for laughs I included a comment that the tour of Niagara Falls was canceled because the state was diverting the river and shutting off the falls so they could perform some cleanup & maintenance.

Things quickly got out of hand because my e-mail got forwarded around to literally hundreds of fellow car club members, 90% of whom fell for it. Someone even wrote the Office of Parks & Recreation to complain! Not everyone had a sense of humor about it when word got out it was a prank.

The ‘worst’ one for me actually didn’t become the worst one until a couple months afterwards. Last April Fool’s Day, I put on my FB status that I was about to become a grandmother. Not many people believed me despite my many attempts to convince them. Lo and behold, I found out in June that my daughter was expecting so THIS April Fool’s Day, I have a preciouslittlebeautifulhoneysweetdelicious 11 week, 3 day old granddaughter with whom I am madly in love (can’t you tell?)! :-)

I say worst because, although I clearly love my gran’diva (as I call her), I wasn’t expecting my daughter to have a baby in the middle of her college career. To learn she was pregnant was a huge disappointment. Of course, once I saw that cute lil face of my granddaughter’s, I realized what a great blessing she is. However, I’ve since decided not to play any more April Fool’s Day jokes!

BlacqButtafly – remember (as we discussed in another post..) EVERYTHING happens for a reason. Your gorgeous granddaughter was sent here for a reason; enjoy your blessing and hopefully your daughter will pursue finishing her college career now, some how, some way, for them BOTH! ;0) Have a great weekend…

My daughter pulled a good one on me this morning. She called me from college and sounded like a mess. She tearfully told me she had gotten a ticket in a bar last night for underaged drinking, she was scared, didn’t know what to do, and asked me not to tell her father. I tried to stay calm and asked her the details and to get a copy of the ticket to me as soon as possible. I was pretty upset, thinking there was a chance she could be jeopardizing her schooling and her housing, when all of a sudden she said, hold on a sec, put me on speaker phone so her roommates could hear, and yelled “April Fools.” I never saw it coming. Good one.

One year – a few days before April 1 – the media began to predict a massive snow storm that would hit the area! 6″-10″ was the prediction. We heard about it for 2 days! Price Chopper ran out of bread – milk – toilet paper! What did we get? 83 flakes of snow and some rain! APRIL FOOL!!

The mayor of Boston died in a car crash… Oh wait that didn’t work out well.

Comment by Opie — April 1st, 2011 @ 8:37 am
You don’t linger longer do you Op? It was a plane crash and the mayor of Bof-i-ston got them filed a complaint with the FCC along with the boys being fired.
Fruuuunkkkkkuuuus!